Kidnapped by Commanches then rescued, Cynthia Ann Parker was a victim of cultural genocide twice over
Movie enthusiasts invariably sing the praises of John Ford’s The Searchers. Released in 1956 and starring John Wayne, the film has been described as a masterpiece and shows prominently in critical lists of the best films ever made. It’s inspired by a true story. Or maybe that should be stories in the plural. The Searchers…
Rhea Clyman was the first western journalist to expose the forced famine that killed millions in Ukraine
She’s considered the first western journalist to expose the Soviet famine-genocide that killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s. But although Rhea Clyman sent numerous accounts of Soviet and Nazi atrocities to North American newspapers as a foreign correspondent, she was soon largely forgotten. That is, until four years ago, when Jars Balan, director…
Biden risks pushing Ethiopia onto a path of destruction that cannot be reversed
The Biden administration’s pressure on the Ethiopian government to find a peaceful end to the current war is justified on moral, humanitarian, and geopolitical grounds. However, the U.S.’s threats of sanctions have come and gone without any impact, signalling a lack of understanding of the Ethiopian psyche and a failure to appreciate the complexity of…
Former UN commander leads ‘critical conversations’ on impact of moral injury
The term “moral injury” is relatively recent in our understanding of trauma. When Canada’s Lt.-Gen. Roméo Dallaire led United Nations peacekeeping troops in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi that took a million lives over 100 days, few Canadians beyond the military were aware of the severe psychological damage that witnessing such moral…Any attitude, word, action or law that draws us away from our common humanity steps toward genocide
Most people would agree that evil exists, yet very few of us understand it. We find it convenient to blame all the problems of the world on terrible but powerful individuals, or on one misguided group. In truth, there are good and bad people in every group, and there’s even good and bad in each…
We must educate the many Canadians who don’t know what happened to our Indigenous neighbours
I’ve been teaching high school students about Canada’s residential schools for a number of years. Indigenous content has recently been given a more prominent place in the British Columbia curriculum, and this has had an impact. Students now come to my class with some understanding of this tragic chapter in our history, and we’re able…
Will Canada’s leaders put election campaigning on hold just long enough to deal with this humanitarian crisis?
Afghanistan’s religious minorities are facing nothing less than a genocide but the Canadian government has yet to make a firm commitment to protect some of the most vulnerable among them, say Canadian human rights activists. Hazaras and Christians – two of these minorities – have been cornered into a desperate situation ever since the fall…
Communist dictator Xi Jinping showers praise on the 33 Senators who deny he is perpetrating genocide
If there was any doubt that foreign propaganda is influencing Canadian democracy, the defeat of a Senate motion to recognize the Uyghur genocide last month should remove it. In total, 33 Canadian Senators voted to turn their backs on millions of Muslim Uyghur victims and their families and were hailed by Beijing as “people of…
They’re not guilty of the crimes of their ancestors but they are responsible for building a more peaceful and tolerant country
When Germany talked about reuniting as one country after the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989, many world leaders were quite concerned, especially British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President François Mitterrand. But Germany wasn’t the same country it was in the first half of the 20th century, and today it isn’t…
We are in a stronger position to deal with China than many assume
In a scene from the pre-COVID world in December 2019, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sat down for an interview in a crowded, bustling Italian restaurant in Montreal. Clinging on to power with a minority government, Trudeau’s Liberal Party had just survived a bruising election. But with Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou still under house arrest in…